Poetry

Cancer Can Be Fatal

Cancer Can Be Fatal

Jody's Notes

Ice crying itself into nonexistence in my glass. It was a game I played in the 1980s. By myself most of the time (sitting in a restaurant or a cafe with piece of paper in front of me, the pen idling). Or with some friends when my friends were willing to play this game. Think of "images." That's what I called these mini-thoughts that I'd try to come up with on a theme ("ice," "rocks," sidewalks," etc.), unattached to any poem, but beautiful in themselves. Later (sometimes years and years later), I'd spread out the pieces of paper, cardboard, napkins, whatever, that these things were written on (with dates, usually--I liked to know when I'd come up with something), and I'd try to grow them into poems. It's how I grew all the poems I wrote in the 1980s, and it's how I sometimes start a project of writing poems even today. The aim: to build a poem--a continuous emotional narrative in someone's voice--around a set of related images. As I constructed the narrative (about anything, I didn't care; the voice of anyone, I didn't care), some images stayed, some didn't, some mutated, some didn't.

And this poem. I read it to a small audience somewhere or other and afterwards someone comes up and asks me if the poem helped. "Helped how?" I ask. "Helped you feel better. Helped you get through it." And then I realize.

Now what? It's a poem, I want to say. And that's what we do when we write poems. Some of us, anyway. And if we do it right, we get it right. Authenticity isn't a matter of autobiography. Unless you're unimaginative.